Facebook sued for not stopping killer who gave 4 minute notice

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Facebook collects and analyzes information about users’ emotional states: whether we feel worthless, defeated, anxious, or like a failure. It also collects and analyzes our geographic locations, be it by via GPS, cellular data, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

It has access to enough information about us that it can ascertain our intentions and activities, often in real-time speeds of less than a second. This information is behind what founder Mark Zuckerberg has said is the platform’s “ability to quickly reach people worldwide in an emergency,” and it’s why he’s confirmed Facebook’s “unique position to prevent harm” with services such as Safety Check.

So why couldn’t Facebook help to stop a killer who posted that he would murder a man in four minutes? And why is it that Facebook couldn’t tell police where the killer was, after he had fatally shot 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr. on a Cleveland street last April?

… in spite of the killer having filmed a first-person view of the shooting and having uploaded it to his Facebook page, where, according to The Guardian, it remained for more than two hours and was copied, reposted and viewed millions of times?

Those are the questions Godwin’s family is asking in a lawsuit it filed against Facebook on 19 January. The family is charging the social network for negligence and wrongful death.

Godwin’s murderer was Steve Stephens, a 37-year-old job counselor for teens and young adults. Godwin, the father of ten, was out picking up cans in a plastic shopping bag, his daughter, Debbie Godwin, said. She described him as a gentle man.

Not because he needed the money, it was just something he did. That’s all he was doing. He wasn’t harming anyone. We called him the junk man. He’d pick up things off the street and fix them. He picked up bikes and he fixed them.

On 16 April 2017, minutes before he shot Godwin, Stephens posted this desperate, threatening message, saying he was at his “breaking point”:

FB my life for the pass year has really been f*ck up!!! [sic] I lost everything I ever had due to gambling at the Cleveland Jack casino and Erie Casino… I not going to go into details [sic] but I’m a my breaking point I’m really on some murder shit…FB you have 4 minutes to tell me why I shouldn be on death row!!!! I’m dead serious #teamdeathrow

After the shooting, Stephens fled the scene. Police found him days later in Pennsylvania. They tried to pull him over, but after a brief pursuit, Stephens shot and killed himself.

The lawsuit alleges that Facebook knowingly failed to report Stephens’ commission of a felony to law enforcement authorities and, because of that, Godwin was killed “within a reasonable vicinity of Mr. Stephens’ location at the time the Facebook defendants learned of his intention to commit murder.”

Other allegations from the lawsuit included that Facebook knew that Stephens had previously made violent threats; that it knew the killer owned firearms and had a violent predisposition; that he wasn’t willing to wait any longer for a response from Facebook before carrying out his threats; that Facebook did nothing, in spite of Stephens’ reiteration that he was going to commit random killings on the public, along with who he was and where he was located; that he had subsequently murdered Godwin on a public street, “just minutes from the location where he previously advised the Facebook Defendants of his criminal intentions; and that still Facebook took no action, failing to alert the police, in spite of having “more than sufficient time to act and prevent Robert Godwin, Sr.’s death.”

This is not about free speech or posting violent content, the Godwins stressed in their suit. It’s about data mining that could have saved the life of Robert Godwin Sr. had Facebook used it for that instead of just for maximizing advertising revenue.

Besides Facebook, the suit also named ad-tracking company Atlas Solutions and social analytics firm CrowdTangle, the latter of which “collects information about Facebook users for the specific purpose of helping publishers and media companies surface stories that matter, measure their social performance and identify influencers.”

Within days of Godwin’s murder, Zuckerberg gave his condolences to the Godwin family and said that Facebook has “a lot more to do” to avoid such tragedies. In a blog post, Vice President of Global Operations Justin Osofsky said at the time that Facebook “prioritize[s] reports with serious safety implications for our community, and are working on making that review process go even faster.”

The lawsuit seeks an amount in excess of $25,000 for compensatory damages; punitive damages; the costs, expenses and attorney’s fees incurred by the plaintiff; and “any further relief” the court deems appropriate.

Facebook associate general counsel Natalie Naugle told The Guardian that the company has policies that prohibit direct threats of harm and that it gives users tools to “report content that violates our policies, and take swift action to remove violating content when it’s reported to us”.

We sympathize with the victim’s family, who suffered such a tragic and senseless loss.

10 comments on “Facebook sued for not stopping killer who gave 4 minute notice”

They should be going after everyone that “followed” him for double that then, since they are a real person and not an algorithm. But really, 4 min notice wouldn’t even give the police a chance to arrive – if they knew where he was. Very sad, apparently nobody helped him, and he should have just shot himself in the first place.

1) Facebook is not the police and it is not their job to prevent crime
2) The most that was stated in this person’s post was, “I’m really on some murder ****”. How would anyone divine from that statement what he was about to do?
3) The sheer volume of posts that are similar to this must be staggering, with the vast majority never leading to anything
4) I would not reasonable expect that any employee of Facebook would be aware if I posted something on my wall addressed to the company, such as “FB you have 4 minutes to tell me why I shouldn be on death row!”
5) Instituting some kind of post-mining algorithm that will automatically trigger a call to law enforcement is a really bad idea. I can only imagine the “fun” people would have with it. If you think swatting is bad now, wait until this system is in place. The ease at which you will be able to trigger dispatches (or at least automated calls/alerts) on your own account or others (which you can gain access to due to phones left unattended, known account credentials or hacking) would be insane. Besides that, the type of algorithms that we’re talking about here are the same kind being used for spam filtering. They most likely apply some kind of Bayesian probability to a series of data points and trigger when the resultant score is above a predefined level. Just like spam, there will be both misses and false positives

You pretty much summed up all the reasons why this is a bad idea, but on top of all that, I think the lawsuit itself is bad for all of us. The most this lawsuit can do, since it’s clearly not going to be successful in court, is convince FB that it’s too much trouble to attempt to monitor and help people.
FB has no duty of care over its users (at least on what they do in the outside world); it’s trying to help them for good PR. But if it DOES help people then it’s a good thing and it’d be a shame to kill it because it couldn’t help this one person.

Creepy, first facebook is a social network not a security center, neither the police, so it has nothing do with the case. And FB has AI and stuff……nonsense, if it really had a so good AI there would be no fake news or malicious ADs, because the “Intelligence” would get it.

I think the part that is strange is that no one called the authorities immediately upon stumbling upon said posts and/or video so they are at least aware. I mean there are signals that let you know its not a hoax.

It’s a tragedy, but every day I get more and more sick of people blaming providers of online services for not nannying it’s user-base. Since when did people stop being responsible for their own actions?

Facebook is NOT responsible for people being stupid, selfish, and sick….. where was this guys family and friends??? We know peopel saw his post and they didnt do anything so why should FB be the only one held accountable??? These lawyers just wanted money and used hurt people to get it! Shame on them!